


You Dry The Riverbed, And So He Builds A Well

by th_esaurus



Category: Vikings (TV)
Genre: Dom/sub, F/M, M/M, dub con, god issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-29
Updated: 2013-03-29
Packaged: 2017-12-06 20:49:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/740020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/th_esaurus/pseuds/th_esaurus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"This is how you pray?"</p>
<p>"Yes."</p>
<p>"Then close your eyes and pray."</p>
<p>Athelstan breathed in, shortly. His wide eyes were so bright the sun clouded over jealously. "For what should I pray?"</p>
<p>"What do I care?" Ragnar told him, ever so flippant.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Dry The Riverbed, And So He Builds A Well

It was a game, of sorts. This was how Ragnar saw it at first.

 

He did not know how Athelstan viewed the thing, and he did not much care to, either.

 

*

 

He worked until Ragnar bade him stop. That was the first thing he noticed. Once shooed out of the house, to feed the pigs and fetch fresh water and pick thorns from the goats' hooves, he did not set foot across that threshold again until he was called in for dinner, or Lagertha had chores inside for him, or Gyda wished for a story at eventide. Ragnar left him out there, one night, just carelessly, and found the priest asleep and shivering in the sty the next morning.

 

They washed the hay and pig shit out of his hair together, and Ragnar laughed and said he smelled as bad as the hound after a storm, and Athelstan did not laugh.

 

That evening, Ragnar leant against the door frame and watched as he called Athelstan inside. He came so simply and so humbly. He had no stature, no presence, small like a woman; though only one who has never seen battle. He looked like grass after a long winter. Undergrown.

 

"There is more bread," Ragnar told him at their meal. Bjorn had been reaching for the loaf, and pulled back his hand, sullied.

 

"I have had more than my fill, thank you," Athelstan murmured.

 

"Eat," Ragnar said again. "It's not a request."

 

Athelstan swallowed in the way he had when he needed to say something his conscience or his God would not allow. He chewed the bread slowly, dryly, and even when his wife and children had fallen away to their evening business, Ragnar stayed and watched the priest and did not release him from his gaze until his plate was clean.

 

*

 

Ragnar led him into the deep woods.

 

The day was warm enough that a shirt only made him angry, but Athelstan would leave none of his skin bare even in front of the hearth; he looked worn and miserable in his heavy shirt as they trudged with no apparent aim through the thick leaves, dew-sodden dirt. The silver bark all around them looked almost like steel where it caught the sun, and Athelstan seemed to want to touch those foreign trees; but Ragnar marched on and he could only follow.

 

They reached a clearing of no real distinction, and Ragnar looked it over appraisingly.

 

"Are—we lost?" Athelstan ventured.

 

"Only you are," Ragnar said. He nodded to a patch of ground no different from twenty others. "Here. Kneel."

 

"I—"

 

"Here," Ragnar repeated.

 

The priest hesitated, looked at him, and then went very slowly to his knees upon the ground. Ragnar held him at each wrist, clasped his long fingers together, palm to palm.

 

"This is how you do it?" He asked, though he knew. "This is how you pray?"

 

"Yes."

 

"Then close your eyes and pray."

 

Athelstan breathed in, shortly. His wide eyes were so bright the sun clouded over jealously. "For what should I pray?"

 

"What do I care?" Ragnar told him, ever so flippant.

 

He left the priest there, in that puzzle of a forest, and walked back to his land with a twist in his heels to muddy his tracks.

 

It rained overnight. Lagertha told him to make them breakfast, and when Ragnar scoffed, she spit that he had misplaced their slave and would pick up the slack. "He is not misplaced," Ragnar told her. "He is doing as he has been told."

 

*

 

Ragnar stopped in the town and bartered for some meat, and then it seemed a good time for drinking, so he drank his fill, and took the wrapped carcass back to his family, and went into the woods to fetch Athelstan. He knew the way, and walked it twice as fast, despite the darkness and the mead in his veins.

 

Athelstan still knelt. His nose and knuckles were bruised red with the evening cold, and a single droplet of rain lingered still on his left eyelash. His eyes were closed. His hands, trembling, were clasped.

 

He could not stand. Ragnar wrapped him in his furs, made a kind of sling of them, and carried the priest home on his back.

 

*

 

He had not bound Athelstan since almost the first day. What point was there of keeping him noosed and roped when would not run? He had too great a sense of self-preservation for that, at the start, though perhaps stranger bond tied him to Ragnar's side now.

 

He told Athelstan to fetch his boots and a traveling knife and a length of rope, and while Athelstan carefully laced the boots for him, Ragnar wrapped the cord around his neck, and fashioned a knot, and tested it three times.

 

Athelstan stilled under his handiwork. Ragnar put a thick hand against the priest's soft jaw, and could feel his lifeblood dancing.

 

He dragged Athelstan into the village. He had business to attend to; he needed a boar for his sows and had enough self-respect to barter hard for one. There was no need for the priest to be at his side. Ragnar dragged him along anyway.

 

It was as though the trickster god had wrapped a white cloak around the priest and turned him invisible. Athelstan had been in Ragnar's keeping long enough now that his companions and friends knew him to be favoured by Ragnar, knew to nod at him and not to strike him when he laughed in Ragnar's bawdy company.

 

They simply looked through him now. With a rope around his neck, he was as commonplace as air. They did not even notice him.

 

Ragnar felt like Loki had struck dumb and blind every person but him.

 

It felt like a privilege.

 

On their return to the farm, Athelstan walked some feet behind, and lingered often. Every time he slowed too much, Ragnar tugged on the rope to jerk him forward. And every time, Athelstan made not a single noise of complaint.

 

Ragnar tugged harder, kept his leash short, and listened for the hitches in Athelstan's warm breath.

 

*

 

He made love to his wife before they slept. Lagertha was not much spirited tonight, but languid, made him work for his pleasure, dug her nails into the lean meat of his shoulders and moaned sleepily under his thrusts. She told him not to spill inside her, and scratched at his skin when he was slow to pull out, and finished him with her tight hand as vague apology, kissing him as he came.

 

"You are cruel," Ragnar said, after, as he kissed her back.

 

"And your mind is elsewhere," she retorted, smiling.

 

*

 

He could not guess the hour when he awoke, only that there were night beasts still prowling and he had to feel his way about the house by touch. Ragnar whispered the priest's name, so as not to wake his wife.

 

There was no answer.

 

He stumbled to the hollow corner where Athelstan made his bed, and felt among the empty furs. He was not there, and Ragnar grinned like a wolf in the darkness.

 

Ragnar trod carefully over the sleeping dog, and past the little annex where his children lay, and padded barefoot out to the hall. The leather curtain above the doorway had been crudely pulled aside to let in the hazy moonshine, just enough light to see by.

 

Athelstan stood stark in the cold slice of moonlight that cut in through the close night. He wore his priest's robe, which he had not donned for weeks, and nothing on his feet, and Ragnar's knotted rope around his neck.

 

His head hung terribly low, and his hand moved unsure beneath his awkward clothes. It stuttered slow for a moment as he felt the prickle of Ragnar's eyes upon him, and stopped altogether for a few shameful seconds, and then Ragnar said, "Go on."

 

So he went on. He gripped the rope at his throat with his free hand and brought himself off like a boy who doesn't know what pleasure feels like yet, and Ragnar came up close behind him, and did not touch him, but claimed every breathless noise the priest made as his own.

 

*

 

Two days later, at breakfast, Ragnar told Athelstan to come sit with him. The priest hesitated, for there was no other chair. The children were distracted by their food, and Lagertha spared him only a glance.

 

And so he got up, and folded his legs under him, and sat on the floor at Ragnar's side, and ate what the man passed down to him, and, for a moment so short it was almost no time at all, he pressed the side of his temple against Ragnar strong thigh.

 

Ragnar carded his fingers through the priest's hair, down below the table, where nobody else could see.

 

*

 

A raid was planned, in the lands to the West, and Ragnar thought about taking Athelstan with him. He thought about pushing the priest to the blood-wet ground as his men took their fill of England's treasures, and holding his head up, and making him watch his hidden island fall; making him watch Ragnar carve through his God's land and leave a tattoo of blood-filled scars wrought into it by his axe alone.

 

Instead, he took his wife and a handful of trusted men.

 

The raid took more than a month, and closer to two. Word had spread that the Sabbath was no longer safe in the towns of good Christian men, and Ragnar rounded up a family of farmers, had his soldiers hold them while he wandered the plains and slaughtered every lamb in the name of Thor.

 

Storms came, and then abated, as Odin's jealousy overtook the skies.

 

While the ground was soft and gripping, and the Englishmen were venturing out of their homes for the first time in days, Ragnar led his attack.

 

*

 

He took no slaves to sell, back on the boat. It did not cross his mind to take more slaves, now.

 

*

 

His children rushed him, as they always did, when he returned home. Athelstan greeted him simply with a bowing nod, and when Ragnar put a hand heavily on the priest's shoulder, he could feel the nervous ripples of Athelstan's fear and love and longing shudder down every inch of his slight body.

 

 

"All is well?" Ragnar asked. He did not take his hand from Athelstan's skin.

 

The priest hesitated, then smiled, nodded as he was supposed to.

 

"You must not keep things from me," Ragnar told him, very low.

 

Athelstan chewed on the inside of his mouth and then said, trying to keep his voice light, "It is only that I am not treated so well in the village, when I'm without you."

 

He reluctantly gave Ragnar two names, three. One was Halvdan, and Ragnar knew the man, knew where he kept his home.

 

He was distracted while the family ate, and left half way through the meal.

 

On his return, Athelstan sat with him outside with a bucket of water and a ragged cloth, and wiped the blood from his ruined knuckles. A few specks from his cheek and forehead. His face was very close, but he had none of the worried lines that fear and violence usually drew upon him. He seemed calm.

 

Throughout this whole game, he had seemed calm.

 

"Your God let men take you from him," Ragnar growled, as Athelstan's fingers lingered too long upon his jaw. "But I will not let them take you from me."

 

*

 

Ragnar could still hear his priest praying, every single night before bed. That hushed voice, words not of his own tongue, head bowed in reverence, his eyes closed. Ragnar had always found it quaint and peaceful before, a murmuring foreign lullaby, at once familiar and so, so strange.

 

But now he would not stand it anymore.

 

He went from his bed, naked, and grabbed Athelstan by the scruff of his neck, and dragged him away to where they had no need of being quiet. "You cannot worship your god and worship me at the same time," he spat, "And only one of us is here, now."

 

It was enough. It was permission enough.

 

Athelstan felt to his knees with a dry sob, and did not hesitate, and kissed Ragnar's feet, his ankles, the caps of his knees.

 

It did not matter that Athelstan knew nothing of pleasing a man. He guessed enough, had learnt enough in his plaintive eavesdropping. He was used to praying with his hands and with his mouth and did the same now, took Ragnar's cock between his lips, moaned against it. Ragnar grappled with the priest's clothes, stripped him bare, and when Athelstan leant back to let him, a wet thread of spittle pulled taut from his bottom lip; between his mouth and Ragnar's half-hard cock.

 

Ragnar put a hand in his hair and told him he was a good man.

 

Rubbed his palm gently, magnanimous, against Athelstan's shaking nape and told him he was a good man, even if he was not a good Christian.


End file.
